... a considerable mystery, for it appears that there were in fact three 'Heathrow Plots' in circulation. In early 2003, Tony Blair's government famously surrounded Heathrow with tanks and troops, citing 'quality intelligence' of an imminent attack. With the Iraq invasion looming in the background and widespread disbelief in the WMD fairy-story, many accused Mr Blair of cooking up a false alarm with regard to Heathrow too. But it seems very unlikely that Mr Blair was behind it: the impetus for the alert appears to have come from MI5 issuing a warning to the Met's Assistant Commissioner David Veness, who was backed up by his boss Sir John Stevens. They played their hands close to ...

... sentimental public support, while reduced to 20% of the size at the start of HRH's reign. The independent management of the UK nuclear deterrent was quickly dropped by Macmillan (in 1958) in favour of co-operation with the US and the last solely UK-built and maintained nuclear weapons, free fall bombs, were scrapped by Blair in 1998. Britain now borrows its nuclear deterrent from the US, and would have to consult it prior to its use, this arrangement being cheaper than paying to build, maintain and deploy an exclusively UK owned deterrent (i .e . it is cheaper than following the procedures used by everybody else).7 Although disputes continue ...

... government, acknowledging this in writing in the mid 1960s. From the seller's end the game becomes finding the bent official with influence. A process which involves 'commissions' is no big problem for business – in which 'commissions' are commonplace – but it has been for politicians, especially members of the Labour Party whose official ethos before messrs. Blair and Brown was something vaguely along the 'merchants of death' line. The Labour government of Harold Wilson solved that problem in 1966 by creating an insulation layer, the Defence Sales 1 Over a hundred source notes to several of the chapters, for example. 2 It's suggested but not demonstrated in Thatcher's Wiki entry. In the preface the ...

... Metropolitan Police, Hanning discloses: 'The horse was acquired from the police by Brooks partly for David Cameron's use. It is a story which speaks volumes about both her and Cameron. ' (Author's italics.) The details need not detain us save to say that a Hanning source confirms that the then head of the Met, Sir Ian Blair, arranged Brooks' use of the horse and was told that Cameron would also be riding it. There are lots of similar stories of the masked meshing of the mutual interests of the rich and powerful. Old Etonian Hanning, who brought the photograph of the Prime Minister's Bullingdon Club mates briefly into the public domain with his biography of ...

... one of the chief architects of the economic mess we are in. This chapter shows how. Robin Ramsay Chapter 8 Into office 'It is scarcely credible that Britain should once again be crucified on an excessively high exchange rate. ' – Wynne Godley, The Observer (Business) 23 August 1998. By the time Labour took office Brown and Blair had promised to toe the conservative line on economic policy: no income tax rises, no increased public spending, no attempts to use government to direct the economy; and no reacquisition of the privatised state assets, the roughly £100 billion of taxation- created assets flogged-off for around £50 billion during the Thatcher years. ...

... . The Crown Prosecution Service is now reported to be considering evidence against Janner as part of an inquiry into historical child abuse.25 Janner took ermine when he retired from the Commons in 1979. He was succeeded in his Leicester West seat by Patricia Hewitt, a former aide to Neil Kinnock who became a New Labour Cabinet minister under Tony Blair. Several stories have appeared suggesting that the former president of the Jewish Board of Deputies, vice-president of the Jewish Leadership Council and the World Jewish Congress is now suffering dementia. The Daily Mirror reported, however, that 25 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/ ...

... melt-down of 2008 which caused the deficit problem. The deficit – and he means the gap between government spending and government income, not the trade deficit or the total national debt – was rising before 2008 and is caused by UK taxes being too low. But no mainstream British politician will argue for raising taxes. While in office Blair, Brown and Balls encouraged the delusion that the UK could have American levels of taxation and EU levels of public services. Apologising for that and the NuLab abandonment of manufacturing in favour of 'the knowledge economy' would be the beginning of adult politics. This stuff Balls is giving us is just baby talk. Addendum: open mouth, ...

... reading, the meat of the book has to be what it tells us about Gordon Brown's relationship with Murdoch and his representatives and what Cameron had to do to get Murdoch to change sides. As Davies points out, since 1979, 'no British government has been elected without the support of Rupert Murdoch....Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown have consistently cleared their diaries and welcomed him to the inner sanctum of their governments (and then disclosed as little as possible of what passed between them). ' Brown, in this respect, was no different from his predecessors, continuing 'to cuddle up to News International'. At one point, when Rebekah Brooks became ...

... who was used in a big disinformation operation against the Soviet bloc in the early 1950s by the CIA.58 This is fascinating and intricate stuff, in places as hard to follow for a virtual beginner like me as some of the more complex JFK forensic analyses. Friends of the Friends The emasculation of the Labour Party is generally attributed to Blair and Brown in the 1990s; but it began much earlier, with the 1988/9 policy review which started the process of accommodating the City and the Americans. Leading that review was party leader Neil Kinnock, now Lord Kinnock. Adrian Gatton, via Tony Frewin, pointed me at a collection of conversations with former US diplomats. ...

... had developed in finance facilitated significant inflows of foreign capital into the USA and Britain (masking the trend to trade deficits in both countries). The vast sums of money washing round London and New York as a result flowed via corporate tax and asset and bond purchases to governments (so helping to finance the expansion of the welfare state under Blair and Brown) and, via banks, building societies and finance companies, both to businesses and to millions of private citizens. Lending expanded, personal and corporate borrowing mushroomed. The most spectacular examples of this occurred in the UK, where debt rose more rapidly than in any other developed nation between 1990 and 2011, by which time ...